Asus ROG GX700: First look

There’s just something about beautifully crafted hardware that makes me immediately fall in love. It’s usually just Razer that reserves this love of hardware for me but Asus has me swooning with its ROG GX700. With the first-ever liquid-cooled laptop made for the most outrageously entitled gamers, Asus has gone above and beyond with a machine gamers can’t help but worship. If you ever told a conventional PC gamer you’re investing in a gaming laptop, they would almost certainly scoff and roll their eyes while whispering or yelling noob to your face. The ROG machines over the past few years have helped changed this perception and now Asus has outright broken it.

The ROG GX700

The ROG GX700 is a beautiful 17.3-inch gaming laptop with best specifications in the category. It comes with a liquid cooling dock that once connected allows you to overclock your laptop to the specifications you want. Yes, overclock. A term PC gamers of an older time would fear and revere at the same time. Of course, Asus has put mechanisms in place so that you don’t shatter the internal systems. But considering that’s a possibility, you shouldn’t dismiss the term as a gimmick offered by Asus either.

This isn’t those tiny little suitcases you can carry as hand baggage. It’s huge!

The whole thing comes in this beautiful suitcase which opens up into two sections: the laptop in one and the dock in the other. The laptop is thinner than I expected and extremely sleek with two bars of light and the logo in between on the front-end of the screen. The dock is practical and well-designed — usually, one is sacrificed for the other. The laptop sits perfectly on the dock’s base while you push the flat metal lever down that extends the connectors from the dock into the laptop and the sheer gaming magic is ready to commence.

I was playing Far Cry Primal for our short demo but before I started the game, I jumped into the ROG spec manager where I could, for the first time in my life, overclock a gaming rig without any hesitation or fear of consequence. You can set up multiple profiles for different games and switch around as and how I needed. Far Cry Primal obviously merits the dial going up to 10, but if I were going to switch to Counter Strike later or just play online billiards, I’d take it a notch down.

Tech specs

Now to dive into the juicy specifications offered up: you get a beautiful 17.3-inch Full HD screen (with a 4K option if you prefer), Intel Core i7 6820HK processor, up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM, the beautiful NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 with 8GB memory all weighing in at 3.9kg and the dock with built-in liquid cooling at 4.6kg. It’s worth noting that the ROG GX700 is VR-ready for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. So investing in this has you sorted for the true next generation of gaming.

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I haven’t enjoyed PC gaming like this in years and can’t wait to dive in deep for our in-depth review that’ll be coming in soon. The Asus ROG GX700 is available at Virgin Megastores all across the UAE and Letstango.com for Dh19,999.